Atlantic Puffin

    Even though I stayed up too late watching HGTV, I was strangely excited to wake up early for a jog and a swim.  The cold and wet morning was a dream come true for  the heat-hater that I am.  I jogged along the shore, found a bike path and turned around at a grassy jetty.  When I got back to the center, I found Courtney and Kira at the beach.  They watched as I took a dive into the icy, mucky water.  Ahhhh-there's no better way to start a day.
    As long as you add some coffee, that is. 
    Our first task of the day was to look at King's Fading Footprints web site and create graphic of how the expedition and its product were structured.  I was especially impressed by the documentary video that the kids made to explain how the expedition was conducted.  I like the idea of a process themed documentary, as opposed to a content themed video.  I think the self obsessed middle schoolers respond better to something about themselves.
    Here is Raka and I hard at work:

    We continued with a tutorial on creating a web site using Netscape.  We had directions to follow, I followed them, mission accomplished.  My first web page! I thought it would be much harder. 
    After lunch, Dave Sparks showed us his collection of animals, including an endangered box turtle.  Dave is a local animal control expert who takes in hurt animals at his home.  Besides the box turtle, he brought a barred owl, a baby fallow deer, a soft chinchilla, a non smelly skunk and a 7 foot boa constrictor that a few summit participant wrapped around their necks.  Dave explained how to tell the difference between a female and male box turtle.  The female's under shell is concave, while the male's is convex.  They fit together well when they mate.
   
    It was then time to start the watercolor paintings of our birds.  I was reminded how little patience I have for intricate, detailed oriented projects like this one.  I have more compassion for my kids who freak out when I give them intricate, detailed oriented tasks.

    To be blunt, I plan to conduct the Fading Footprints, in a  manner as close as possible to the way it is done at King.  Except that we will study Prospect Park ecosystems, of coarse.  Which are not really fading.
    Now that I've gotten that out in the open...
    One big problem I had during the expedition last year is that I felt  like I knew what the expedition was all about (including what our goals were and what our product was going to be), but the kids were not so aware of these things.  So I felt like it was my expedition, but not theirs'.  I really think that if they do more documentation of the PROCESS of the expedition (like in King's video documentary), they would get a better idea of the whole picture of the expedition. 
     I think students will also feel more ownership of the expedition and be clearer about what is going on as a whole if they learn to make the web site, learn to scan, take photos and video and then learn to share them with others, and borrow others' images for their own site.  Most will get into that techie stuff and get a better sense of the point of the expedition in the process.
    For the kick-off of our expedition, we should meet with a park ranger in the Audubon Center of Prospect Park.  I need to set this up now.  I hope there is someone there or who could come there who could show us some live animals like Dave Sparks did.
    Oh, the watercolor drawings.  I wish we could do them using photographs that WE took of our animals.  I should incorporate math into the grids, even though Ellen showed us a way to not have to.  I still feel like there is more work to be done thinking about how to make them scientifically accurate observational drawings.  How could we incorporate thinking about physical adaptations that the animals have into the drawing activity?
    Where should I jog tomorrow??

   At our morning meeting we learned that Tom is an official birder.  He has even participated in the birding world series.  His reading from the Sibley field guide was an appropriate start to our day of birding. 
    We arrived at Goose Rocks Beach and met Joy and Jordan who work for Maine Audubon and Maine Fish and Wildlife.  We learned how they survey the endangered, speedy Piping Plover and the dive- bombing Arctic Tern populations that nest at the beach.  On the beach in front of people's private homes, the Audubon has fenced off the dune areas where the birds are nesting.  On this and other beaches in Maine where the birds can be found, they record how many adults and chicks they see each day. They also record information  about what the birds are doing and signs of predation.  I was disturbed to see so many new homes built in this fragile area.
  Joy jumped one of her own fences to get us a pic of a tern nest with incubating eggs.






    Tom the Birder made an index of all the bird species that we saw on Goose Rock Beach.
    After lunch we read Dave's article about the framework of the Fading Footprints and of expeditions in general.  We discussed how the connecting statements developed at King were or were not focuses of the expeditions that we did at our own schools.
    We struggled through a watercolor practice session.  I was reminded to consider where a light source is in a picture and shade objects accordingly.  I need to have a lot more patience for mixing colors and shading when I color in my puffin tomorrow.
    Before our Thai feast, Nicole, Raka and I walked to Bug Light Park to see the Liberty Ships memorial and to take pictures by another lighthouse.

    Although we saw how a wildlife biologist conducts research, the focus was not on conducting research ourselves.  Which was probably for the sake of time.  If I was doing this with my students, I would want them to focus on conducting fieldwork surveys and seeing how their work was actually used. I would also like to see more advocacy work.  The kids could write petitions to raise awareness for the birds' habitat.
    In terms of Prospect Park, I need to see what (if any) wildlife surveys are being done there that the kids can be involved in.  Also, what kind a habitat destruction goes on in the park that the kids could advocate against.  Maybe we could help workers prevent erosion on the hillsides and talk about how erosion affects the animals in the park.
    Again, the watercolor work helped me to empathize with struggling students.  I often ask them to do things that I think are easy, but are actually quite difficult in practice.  I often criticize students for being perfectionists and starting over when work is unsatisfactory.  Although I would still never call myself a perfectionist, today I did feel the frustration of not producing work that I was proud of.
    Creating accurate colors is a form of scientific observation, right?

   A 6: 00 a.m. wake up meant that there wasn't enough time for a morning jog and swim. I felt it later when I crashed around 3:00 p.m. 
    We jumped in the van and road to Scarborough Marsh, an estuary that is a sanctuary for birds and mammals.  After a brief introduction to the animals that we might see, we headed to our canoes.  We spotted many a snowy egret:

We also saw Willets and Tom even spotted an ibis.  And super Tom also updated his species-sited list to include all the species we saw Scarborough Marsh.  Check out the new list here.


We tasted some edible plants that grow in the marsh.  They were salty and would be tasty in a salad.

    Upon returning to the center, we learned how to use iMovie.  We beginners  mastered the basics of uploading and splicing video.  We then moved on to learning to add sound from a "Track A."  Video that had been taken at the marsh and the beach were uploaded from the video cameras by some.  They could then be used to create documentaries for our topic pages. 
    After lunch, we painted the background of our birds.  I got frustrated and had to take a break. 
    We worked on our species pages a bit more and then got ready for our night on the town.

    In terms of getting science content into an expedition, fieldwork seems like the most important piece of the expedition.  It is when students learn to collect data, make observations, experiment and test hypotheses.  I need to remember this when we do our field guides or web pages because our final product must include evidence that students have mastered science content.  There should be evidence of their experimentation, data collection and observations.  I need to remember that including this component is more important than making the product technologically advanced.
    Do I have enough experience with iMovie to teach kids to use it to edit video? Should I spend science time teaching iMovie.  I need to remember to encourage our technology teachers to teach iPhoto and iMovie during technology time.  I have not yet mastered using the Track A and track B method.  I must make a video tomorrow to get my skills up to par.
    I really felt like one of my struggling students when I was painting today.  I got angry, frustrated, lethargic.  I acted out by leaving my work space and going to my room just like a kid might sneak out of the room when they can't handle the assignment.
    What made me feel better?
       - a break from the assignment to get over my frustration and have the energy to get back to work
       -more one on one attention from the teacher
       -a nap
       -food and water
       -more skills based instruction on the skills I felt weak         about.
    I need to remember how I felt when my students are struggling.
      

    After a night at an Irish Pub with curiously little for vegetarians to eat, I woke up early for a jog and a swim.  It wasn't so foggy and I found a shortcut to the bike trail by way of the harbor.  The water didn't seem so cold today.  I guess I am becoming a Mainer.
    It's crunch time for us at Fading Footprint central.  We spent the morning hearing about how the expedition is structured in terms of when different assignments and content are presented.  We also spoke about how every kid can create a spectacular page for the final product if they are given enough scaffolding.  A few of us were hesitant think about giving a struggling student who needed a lot of extra help a good grade even if their product turned out great in the end.  Scott and Dave explained that expedition product grades are not the only assessments that go into a child's final progress reports. 
    I am proud to report that I finished my Atlantic Puffin watercolor!!! I went over the mess I made yesterday with more detail (and confidence) and didn't face the same kind of frustrations that I did yesterday. 
    David critiqued my species page and reminded me to make sure the photos on my page are in the my species page folder and that they are marked "relative" to the page.  He also showed me how to drop the page onto the server.
    Kira and I began our topic page on fieldwork.  It included two videos, one on the fieldwork we did at the beach and one on the fieldwork that we did at the marsh.  Dave taught us how to add a voice over track and how to adjust the original's video's volume and the voice track's volume in order to hear what needs to be heard in the final piece.  We learned to save the iMovie file as a Quicktime file and add opening titles.  Dave  uploaded it to Google Video for us, so that it could get compressed into a smaller file.  
    Sadly, I still didn't get a chance to master the A roll, B roll style of documentary film making.  I guess I'll have to do that on my own.

    I surely don't mind if every kids gets an A on his/her final product.  Ideally, this grade would be spread out to be a part of humanities, math and science grades so it would not overshadow other grades for science assignments.  Peter encouraged me not to include pages that were not finished in the final product like I did last year.  If the product is web-based (as opposed to a field guide), students will have greater assess to it and will feel it if their work is left out of the page.  In my experience with the expedition last year, everyone could have produced a pretty good page, it was just a question of having the time, the working technology and the time to assist struggling students.  Scott made a suggestion of making different adults in the school aware of the project and asking them to mentor a few kids on their progress.
    I really need to write my 6th grade team this summer with a calendar of how I want to structure the Prospect Park expedition so that they can incorporate writing, editing, computer and art time into their personal schedules.  I hope that their non-fiction writing unit can correspond with the expedition.  Also, the technology skills (iMovie, iPhoto, dropping to the server...) could be taught in the beginning of the year and become incorporated into other non-science based expeditions. 
    I need to ask Vicki (our tech guru) about teaching the technology that is used in my expedition in her technology class sometime before we start the Prospect Park expedition.
    I need to figure out what would be the server if we did a web page like this at school???

    Kira and I put the final touches on our topic page early this morning.  We made sure that all the photos and links were correctly relative to our page.  We had some trouble getting our video to play directly on our site but created a link so that viewers can see the videos on Google Video. 
    At 9:30 sharp, we started our critique session.  We looked at each group's page whether or not it was completely finished.  After the groups presented their work, we got a chance to ask them clarifying questions and then wrote about and spoke about our "warm" and "cold" feedback.  The group liked the simplicity and clarity of our page, which was  a relief.  The group liked our video; I feel like it was a stroke of luck that it turned out so well since we didn't spend THAT much time on it. We got advice about creating a "Nav" bar on the top of the page to link to parts lower down.  We were also encouraged to bold important parts of a paragraph that might otherwise be glossed over.   Not only did I get ideas from the specific critiques of our page, but I also got ideas for improvement from seeing others' work.  
    Following the critique session we got time to edit our page.  We learned the importance of checking and re-checking links after small changes are made to make sure that they lead you where you want to go.
    Since out topic page is almost complete, I volunteered to be in charge of the Topics Index page. 

    Kids would get so much out of the critique session.  I wish I had done it with the Prospect Park organism pages.  The kids who did a great job would be proud to show their work and the kids who were behind would be encouraged to get a move on.  Maybe we could even have two critique sessions along the way so that the stragglers could participate in the second one if they had little to show in the first session.  Also, students would be jealous of kids who used cool technology on their pages and would then be encouraged to go learn the technology so that they could incorporate it in their own page. 
    I hope I can remember how to do all this proper linking and dropping!